Awakening The Dragon + Taking a 1 Year Social Media Break

Edit: Immediately after publishing this, I received a notification that this was my 500th post. A fitting milestone to take a break at after ten years.

Sapphic vibes. Listening to Joni Mitchell’s A Case of You (thx Clairo), in a warm bath. Tall, cold 🍋 Perrier (I’m a 95% Pellegrino girl but I’ll suffer this French water… 😏). Two joints: one going in this glass tip holder (dispensary gift), which has me feeling some type of way… a bit Gatsbian, a bit something I don’t know; there is the spirit of je ne sais quoi all around me. Words can not tell you who I am becoming – though I do tell myself, which is probably my trick. It has worked so far.

I could not have written my life to be more beneficial for my character development. Lord knows I would have made it easier, but that, thankfully, was not my fate.

LA inspo vibes. Milk, Brockhampton. I’m going to start skateboarding again. Teenage me was such a brave one. But, oh, how insecure/inexperienced/ignorant/illequipped I was then – though I can’t reject me. I have to take me home. All of me. I have to know I can take skateboard breaks without being psychologically transported back to the feral wildness of my youth – though it reminds me of it.

It’s nice that I can look without looking away, that I can see my own shadow: that I know it’s mine.

I can’t believe I am soon to be graduating from these mountains. They really raised me. I could say that I pissed away some of my time up here drinking, but I needed that fucking pain. We don’t emerge from the flames, but the ashes – after they have burnt us all the way down. Mother of dragons shit. Holy fuck. Mother of dragons. You have to be me to know what certain combinations of words mean to me. The brain is the ultimate sudoku machine. We are all just riddles for ourselves to solve – provided we have the consciousness to do so. I think that’s when actualization happens. Though it’s of course been happening all along.

Joint two. I am such a proud self-taught Jungian. Imagining myself without having encountered Jung and his concepts (Namely: shadow, anima…self) is a scary thought; the me I wanted to become at 21 would have been a shadow of who I have become (Because for happiness and all else beyond appearance: it is the who and not the what that matters). My visions of my future back then were well intending no doubt, but goddamn am I grateful for all the planes and all the mountains they crashed into. And that Jungian inner map by which to traverse all that pain.

A landslide made me. A long, lonely, messy landslide. And I really loved my exes – though it was necessary to tear down the pedestals I had built to them – and others – so I could love myself. There was no other way. Worshipping the wrong people will put you in hell. Worshipping just about anything can annihilate you. Maybe this is the lesson the myth of Satan has to teach us. His folly. His love for god is what did him in. I did the same godddamned thing to myself with women I made goddesses of: if only I hadn’t behaved so damned resentfully towards them when they were only human. But I’m not writing this to look back.

I’ll sit in this bath till I’m Wim Hof. We out here doin bad shit… no, not really – but that’s the dragon energy 🐉 I feel. Though less toxic. Because the dragon is often toxic. Protector. Vaporizer of cities. We have split the atom. Slavery exists around the planet. Human actions are not a monolith. Individuals do this. Good and evil are not two archetypes but two qualities, two results. The dragon is the doer. In Jungian thought, we aim to put the dragon in service of the anima. I guess she is the queen who controls the dragon, without which the dragon becomes a ruthless slave to the ego, which is a dangerous dynamic when it goes wrong, because the dragon serving the ego will often destroy others when we fail, blaming them and attacking others as responsible for the current wounds of the inner child, which are the true barriers to god (or the self 🙏🏼) for someone whose dragon has awakened in service of their ego. The world is full of dragonized egos. A dragon in service of the anima is a world brightening force, and in stark contrast to the toxic dragon for whom nothing is ever enough. Been there. It ended in ashes. But to clarify what the dragon is, it is the force of will turned into action. It is the commanding General we can not disobey – even when we are misplaced.

My dragon in service of my ego wanted nothing but things. My dragon in service of the anima knows what counts and what the stakes of this game of life really are.

Life is not a drill. What we do not do we never do. This is the time to shoot your shot according to the realm of possibility within your imagination and what you believe your potential to be – and if you are fortunate, this includes what you believe you can contribute. Contribution is the name of the dragon in service if the anima. But I would be lying if I said my dragon weren’t also in service of my ego. What can I say, I know what makes me tick, I know how to motivate myself 💅🏼🚀. I know how to awaken the dragon.

The dragon for me is deeply conflated with the father archetype. The poem published previous to this gives further insight into the processes happening within and without me right now as regards the dragon father emerging in me. And it makes sense I had repressed the dragon: its toxic side is enough to turn you off it entirely. But I need the masculine dragon energy. The testosterone in me is meant to give rise to more than frustration, depression, and addiction. Lmao. Been there dawg.

I am just so glad I possess a meaningful participation with my life, with my story. That I am connected to my self and committed to my vision for my self. This conscious participation with life, this level of extroverted action is very dragon.

Interesting to pause and map my inner psyche and my self as consisting of these characters / energies of:

Anima (mother)
Dragon (father)
Inner Child

I have developed the anima and the inner child, but the dragon as a conscious force / energy / lane has been absent. I had an unconscious dragon, toxic, not even in service to the ego. In service to others – the false anima. I’m obvi rapping loose here, but this is what I do. The act of writing is psychologically alchemical in nature. It manifests like music or poetry and no less potent. This for me is part of the interior expressive function of my animus (my interior ‘him’). But for me, the animus and anima were never fully unconscious because of the nature of my psyche, wherein, as an artist, I have always lived “one foot in the unconscious”, as Jung wrote of the artist. But I suppose I have been effectively making the unconscious conscious, particularly as a trans person, but perhaps too much so – if I have made the conscious ‘him’ unconscious, which has been the case until recently, when my decision to move to LA Sept 1 began to awaken the dragon, which, given the consciousness of my anima (my her), naturaly this dragon is ready to really make some magic happen for me.

The dragon can reinvent you. The dragon can do anything within the limits of reality and potential. The dragon has been sleeping, the coiled seepent, waiting for the day when it has been awakened in service of a worthy cause (My anima / Her-self is the princess for my dragon, my animus, my him-self). I realize I am, for the first time, starting to develop off Jung’s model, into some sort of reproductively (evolutionarily) shaped multi-gendered model of depth psychology, which remains archetypal and dualistic in nature (light / dark, her / him, conscious / unconscious), but in which all archetypes exist under a trinity of the her-self, him-self, and child-self human unit. God, if this is my theory, I better be prepared to be throttled for the inherent gender binary of my model… and there are those who would also call it a bigender model, which it effectively is, but it is a bigender model wherein there is a dominant gender on the conscious side and contrasexual gender on the inside: but that is the same as Jung. I guess I’m just adding the prinacy of him-self, her-self variations for cisgender and LGBTQ.

So there would be multiple variations of inside and outside gender metaphors as well as sexuality. Aaaahh… this is rough. But it is interesting. I’ll get where I’m supposed to be with it.

Of note here: I have been told I am verbose, wordy… it goes downhill to long-winded and other less well intended accusations from there, but let me state: I have written 98% of the things I hahe written the last ten years for my self.

The social-psychological mirror of a public facing platform has no doubt helped me evolve; however, I have multi-foot-high stacks of full joirnals. Not everything I write goes here. It is a small percentage. But it is an important percentage. The artists transforms themselves via their art.

Oh, and I’m taking a social media break. I have been on IG @hellaheathcote and do not log into facebook😏, but I am taking a full break. Deleting IG from my phone (not my account). I am thinking of doing it for a year. Dragon says Yes. Ok. It’s done.

Note: I will likely still write here, on my website, but I also may not. I reserve that right.

All I know is that my persona has peaked within the IG confirmation bubble and I need time to myself for myself. For dragon to do what dragon does.

I will miss the stories and posts of those I follow, as well as the messages, but I hope people will email me via my IG if they want to contact me. But also, I won’t cry if they don’t. I have come to value my independence. My freedom. And now I intend to exploit that confidence for my own benefit. What this next year brings exactly, I won’t know until it is over, but I know exactly what I am hoping.

And that vision – me – deserves, and is going to receive, 100% of my attention.

And, lastly, for anyone who thinks this reeks of self-importance, let me just say, thank you. I’ve worked hard for it.

Also, the bathwater is fucking freezing. The year of me awaits. I begin it with a warm shower. Salud 🛁💅🏼💜🚀